


don't wait too long to come home (I'll leave the front light on)

by janie_tangerine



Series: but you and I, we've been through this maybe a hundred times before [4]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Gen, Idiots in Love, M/M, Modern Westeros, Reincarnation, Reunions, Reunited and It Feels So Good, Robb Stark is a Gift, Soulmates, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, and in which jon and sansa have plans good thing for everyone involved, even if he's still nowhere near okay but he'll get there, in which theon keeps on being a responsible person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-07
Updated: 2015-10-07
Packaged: 2018-04-25 08:39:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4953697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janie_tangerine/pseuds/janie_tangerine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>in which Robb is reunited with Jon and Sansa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't wait too long to come home (I'll leave the front light on)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [QueenWithABeeThrone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenWithABeeThrone/gifts).



> Soooo I asked the lovely giftee if she'd like to prompt me something for her birthday which I have a feeling is almost over where she is but is about to start where I am now and she said 'more of the reincarnation AU with Stark reunions and possibly robb and theon cuddling like the dorks they are' or something along those lines and I deliver. <3 I hope you like it!
> 
> Also: this is a direct sequel to the previous fic in the series but it also implies stuff from the first, so sorry but no stand-alone stuff this round. Nothing belongs to me and the title is from the Gaslight Anthem as I'm sure no one had possibly guessed, and okay I think I really like writing Theon being the responsible person okay. ~~I'll see to do it more often~~

“ _What_? No, call him and say it has to be somewhere else.”

“You can forget it,” Theon says, moving his phone out of Robb’s reach, and - shit, why did Robb leave to him to organize that meeting with Jon and Sansa? Because the idiot told them to come to _their_ bed and breakfast room, probably to make sure that Robb wouldn’t chicken out of it. Which - well, okay, fine, he probably had a point, but now it means that he doesn’t have the chance to, and he’d have liked having an out. Just in case.

“But -”

“Robb, I swear I’m going to be outside the door and if I realize that it’s going badly I’m stepping in. But you’re really worrying about nothing.”

“Says you.”

“I talked to Jon before, you know? They want to see you.”

“Yeah, and then they’re going to get here and it’s going to end up even worse than it did with -”

“ _Robb_.” He stops the moment Theon’s hands close around his shoulders. “I can entirely understand why you want to see this negatively, believe me, I know how that feels, but I swear your brother was about to cry in joy when we agreed on time and place, you could hear it, and - listen, about what happened _back then_ \- I remember enough, and I remember how it felt to just hope my dad would welcome me back with open arms and then getting screamed in the face first thing. Considering that you were closer to your mom than I’ll ever be to my dad in any fucking life I could lead I know it has to be a thousand times worse for you. But nothing says she won’t come around, and even if she doesn’t, she’s not the only relative you have, okay? Just take ten breaths and get a grip, you’ll do fine. Just - don’t start thinking you are the problem.”

“Am I not?” He can’t help that, and he regrets it the moment Theon stares at him with a face that says _stop with the self-loathing_.

“Robb, that line of thinking made me decided that conquering your castle was the grandest idea in existence. Considering how that worked out for me, I wouldn’t advise you going down that road.”

… Which is also a fairly valid point. Robb shakes his head, not even trying to get away from Theon’s grip. “Right, fine, can’t disagree with that. It’s just -”

“I _know_. Did you forget the part where I feel your emotions if I pay attention to it?”

Ah. Yeah. The whole soulmate deal all over again - they usually tune each other out per common agreement, but Theon can feel what Robb feels and Robb can read his mind if he so chooses, and neither of them has done that in ages. They agreed that seeing their previous time around they should talk about things instead of falling back on that, so they only ever took that way out in dire situations, but obviously Theon’s doing that now. Not that Robb can blame him - considering how off his game he’s been since meeting his mother, and that he has steadily refused to talk about it, it’s probably a good thing Theon’s trying to keep up with the crap going on inside his head.

“Okay. Okay, I’m seeing them here. But I swear, if you aren’t behind that door - and you can tune in. Actually I fucking want you to, all right?”

“Right, right, I swear I’ll be outside the damned door, now can you at least attempt to approach this entire thing without thinking it’s necessarily going to go bad? Just try that.”

“I guess I can,” Robb concedes, even if he’s nowhere near convinced that it will go as well as Theon keeps on saying.

When Theon shakes his head and pulls him in he goes along without even attempting to get out of it - so maybe it took Theon exactly three days to figure out most of his weak spots, and spending seventeen years left to his own devices most of the time means that he used to ache for this kind of contact, and sometimes he still does.

He’s almost, almost relaxed when someone knocks on the door.

“Wait, are they here now?” He hisses, feeling nervous all over again.

“I figured there was no point in making us wait too long. Too nerve-wracking.”

“Fuck - fuck, okay, listen, I’m not chickening out of this but - can you just tell them what they should expect?”

“Robb -”

“Can you please do that? I need five minutes.”

Theon stares at him for a moment but then nods, relenting without further need to press.

“Okay, but _five_ minutes. You can do this,” he says, smirking, and then he kisses the side of Robb’s head before opening the door and closing it again.

Damn him, Robb thinks, going next to the door. He thinks he wants to hear it.

“Well,” Jon says from the other side of it, and his voice is _just the same as it was last time_ -

(Farewell, Snow, _Robb had said_ -

And you, Stark, _Jon had answered, and Robb had already been planning - he’d have waited a bit to let Jon settle, and then he’d have waited for Bran to wake up, whichever happened first, because he knew Bran would wake up at some point, and they could arrange things and they would all go visit the Wall - Robb had been wanting to see it for a while, after all - and maybe he’d have convinced his mom to come with them because after all if Jon was in the Night’s Watch she wouldn’t have had reasons to be cold towards him anymore, right? And Jon did say she had been very kind to him when he left, so maybe they could all just spend a bit of time together, it would have been a nice adventure, wouldn’t it?_ )

and Robb isn’t sure he can do this, not when he has just felt a sharp, painful pang stab through his heart, “you look a lot better now than - well. The last time we saw each other.”

“Wouldn’t have taken much,” Theon replies. “And I think I was better off than the last time _she_ saw me.”

“Definitely,” Sansa says with the voice of someone who’d rather not think about that particular instance.

( _Robb remembers that she had snow melting in her hair when she left Winterfell, and she looked so radiant and so happy to finally go to court and see her songs come true, little did they all know, and still, he was feeling sad because both Jon and Sansa were leaving but at the same time he wanted her to be happy, he knew what songs she liked, and even if he thought Joffrey was a little prick, if Sansa liked him then he was happy for her, and how little did they know -_ )

“Uhm,” Jon says, “is Robb -”

“He’s in, yes,” Theon sighs. “It’s that - listen, I’m just going to tell you this and then you can go in and I’ll get out of everyone’s way, but - let’s say he didn’t take it well. Yesterday, I mean.”

Robb can hear Jon sighing. “Yeah, I imagined that. I mean, from the way Dad looked, I figured it couldn’t have gone well.”

“And I don’t think anyone tried to bring it up with Mom,” Sansa adds.

“She - she still doesn’t remember anything, right?” Theon asks.

“No,” Sansa says. “And it’s probably better like that.”

“I guess everyone agrees on that, at least,” Theon says. “Anyway, he didn’t take it well. Also, he’s an idiot.”

Robb would like to disagree with that notion, but he should probably keep his mouth shut right now.

“And before you both kill me, I mean that since yesterday went bad and he’s had a pretty shitty turnaround of things at least until we met, now he’s convinced that it’s going to go pear-shaped again. Which is why I’m buying him some time while he freaks out over it, but just - take that into account.”

Robb should have never sent him out, but then again it’s his own fault for not having just manned up and he knew Theon was going to do it, so - yeah. Okay. Fine. He can do this. He glances at the mirror in front of the desk just next to the door - shit, he knows that he’s worrying for nothing, in theory, but the moment he glances at his reflection he wants to just crawl underground and give up on it. He’s wearing a tshirt and jeans that belonged in the box of hand-me-downs that Theon’s mom dumped on him last time they went to Harlaw - he used the only clothes he actually bought new in his life yesterday and he doesn’t feel like wearing them again - and while Theon’s clothes are a vast improvement from group home hand-me-downs… he thinks about Sansa’s sparkling new summer dress that she was wearing in the high school graduation picture he saw on her Facebook account, and at the suit Jon was wearing in that television interview. Now, at least Theon’s jeans aren’t ripped, good thing he takes good care of the stuff he wears, and the nondescript black t-shirt he’s wearing has no holes in it either, but it’s visibly well-worn, his sneakers are serviceable but _old_ , too - then again it’s not like they’re swimming in money so he can’t go and buy another pair, and his face - yeah. He’s aware that he has bags under his eyes that not even three years of fairly healthy lifestyle have quite managed to cancel (he’s had them for years), that it’s obvious that he cuts his own hair and - anyone taking a good look at him would guess that five years ago his life was a complete clusterfuck.

And gods but he doesn’t want two people who actually at some point _looked up to him_ and also thought he had his shit together (and how laughable, he’s had fifteen years to go over his life in old Westeros and he can’t remember one time he thought he had his shit together for real) seeing the depth of it, but - he’s going to have to do it sooner or later, so he stops staring into the mirror and looks at the door instead.

“He shouldn’t be worrying,” Jon says.

“Yeah, what do you think I was telling him before you showed up? Anyway, let’s just - Robb, can I let them in or are you still overthinking this?”

“Let them in,” Robb croaks, and fuck but that did not sound smooth at all.

The door opens. At that, he relents and stops tuning out, figuring that he might want to hear what Theon’s thinking right now -

_Just go for it, idiot, this is nowhere like your mom at all. I’ll be outside, but you aren’t going to need me, and now get the hell out of my head._

… Right. Fine. He just takes a step back as Jon steps inside the room and well, _damn_ but he looks - he looks great. He’s not wearing anything formal, thank fuck, just jeans and a band t-shirt, his hair is falling just over his shoulders in neat curls. His eyes are the exact same gray as their father’s and Arya’s (even if that’s not his father anymore, right…?), and

(I have one more farewell to make, _Jon had told him -_

 _Then I haven’t seen you, Robb had replied, and if only he had known they wouldn’t have seen each other again until now maybe he’d have told him something deeper, something less fucking mundane, maybe_ -)

they stare at each other for a handful of seconds (Robb can see that Jon is taking in the sight of him with a lot of attention, same as he is, and he wishes he wouldn’t because the less he sees the better), and then Robb can’t just take it anymore and decides that someone should just fucking _say something_.

“That’s disappointing,” he says, “didn’t you assure me you’d be all in black next time I saw you?”

For a moment, just when he blurts it out, he thinks that he should have just shut his mouth because really, couldn’t he come up with something better, but then -

Then Jon’s face crumples into something that resembles relief, and wait, is he crying now -

He doesn’t even answer, he just takes a few steps towards him so that they’re face to face and he’s pulling him in and a moment later he’s holding on to him so tight Robb thinks he might run out of breath, in a perfect reverse of what happened the last time they did see each other, and - he reaches upwards, grabs at Jon’s shoulders and tries not to cry himself even if he’s this close to just break down in relieved sobs

( _because that’s what he had been longing for, this exactly - it’s everything he had dreamed of before running into Theon, it was what he hoped he would get if he ever met any of his relatives again. And he had spent his fair amount of time when he was six or seven wondering how it would feel to see Jon again, because Jon should have been his age at this point, more or less, and what if he didn’t have anyone to grow up with the same way they had in Winterfell, because who knew if Jon was with the others or not this time round, and he had thought he’d have liked for the two of them to be brothers again, if only they had the chance. He remembered the times they had shared a bed at night when they were four or five, before Theon was in the picture, he remembered that he’d go play with him even if his mother disapproved and he wished Jon could be here, too, because no one wanted much to do with him, not since he remembered, but of course that never happened, did it_ )

and then -

“Well, you said you’d come see me _soon enough_ , you asshole,” Jon sobs from over his shoulder. “Took your sweet time, didn’t you?”

Which is an entirely good point. “I’m sorry about that,” Robb says, his voice suddenly sounding tiny to his own ears.

“Is it too crowded or do you have space for one more?”

Robb kind of freezes as Jon leaves him enough leeway to look at the door again and right, Sansa’s there too, and she’s wiping tears from her eyes already - her makeup is completely ruined for that matter. And she looks stunning in her blue sundress and matching azure flats, her hair tied into a neat braid over her shoulder. She looks gorgeous, exactly how he had imagined her look on her wedding day centuries ago - a wedding day he would have never witnessed either way - and he remembers snow falling on her cloak the day they left for King’s Landing, when she was still twelve and looked as elated as she is looking now, and his eyes are burning but he figures there’s no point in keeping it in.

“It’s not too crowded,” he manages to say without his voice breaking completely, and then Jon has let him go enough to free one of his arms and Sansa is right under it a moment later, her arm going to his waist and grasping at his threadbare t-shirt, and -

Fine. He breaks down crying right there and if Jon was sobbing before, at least he was being quiet about it. Robb isn’t.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out when he can find some breath for it. “I fucked it up then and -”

“Robb?” Sansa interrupts.

“Yeah?”

“How about you save that for later, even if there’s no need?”

Robb closes his mouth and cries harder when she kisses his cheek, and he thinks, _yeah, okay, I was completely wrong about this_.

\--

He doesn’t know how long they stay like that, but when one of them moves away, he doesn’t know who, he figures that all three of them will have red eyes for the next few hours, considering that they can’t stop wiping at their face. All of them. He awkwardly tells them that there’s some coke in the minibar if they want it and they accept, and for a moment Robb is tempted to grab the vodka shot but he doesn’t. More because he hasn’t had anything heavier than beer for a year and a half and he’d like to keep it like that, even if he could really do with a drink right now. He settles for another coke instead.

“So,” he says after he hands the cans to both Jon and Sansa, “I guess one of us should start first?”

“As long as you don’t apologize for anything,” Sansa says, “because believe me, there’s no one in this room who thinks you did anything wrong back in the day.”

Bless her, even if he wants to tell her that no, it’s nice of them that they’d think that, but he got _everything_ wrong.

“I’ll try,” he says. “So I guess I should go first.”

He tells them, and he doesn’t protest when at some point Sansa takes his hand and Jon puts an arm around his shoulders, and by the time he gets to meeting Theon he feels like he could go to sleep for the entire next month.

“So - well. I moved in with him,” he croaks, drinking the last of his coke. “And - it’s been fine. I mean, I’m not really drinking that much these days, I’m not flunking school and just - I’m good. I am, really, don’t look at me like that.”

Jon punches him in the side. “Shut up, no one’s looking at you _like anything_.”

“By the way, Dacey Mormont lives next door.”

“What, really?”

“Yeah. Her, and - uhm. Your - from what I gathered - your half-brother does? I mean. He was back in the day.”

“What? _Aegon_?”

“Yeah. Him and Jon Connington. Who has actually helped Theon out with the paperwork back when we found each other.”

“Uh, do they -”

“Remember things? Yeah, otherwise I wouldn’t know that you were that closely related in Old Westeros.”

“Right. Dumb question. Er, say hi from me when you go back? We should probably talk stuff out, even if we aren’t related this time.”

“And I’d like to see Dacey again,” Sansa says. “Well, we’ll arrange things another time, I guess. Jon, should you or should I?”

“Guess it’s my turn. You don’t need the Cliff notes about what happened to us in Old Westeros, do you?”

“No. Theon filled me in.”

“Good,” Jon says, and then breathes in and starts talking. So Robb learns that this time around his mother _really_ was Ashara Dayne - he had suspected, but hadn’t found the time or guts to ask his - father, or uncle, or whatever they are now. She and Ned got married around the time Robb’s mom ended up in bed with Brandon Stark, who dropped her like a burning potato the moment he found out she was pregnant at the ripe age of sixteen. Wow, amazing, Robb thinks, now this time his dad has to be the one Stark with asshole tendencies. Not that it counts at this point. Anyway, that charming way of dealing with the problem did cause enough of an uproar when the others in the family found out - according to Jon, when Brandon Stark died in a car accident a year after Robb was born, he and Ned hadn’t been back on speaking terms.

“Then - well, Dad doesn’t like to discuss it but my mom died not long later. Some kind of allergic reaction she wasn’t aware of - I mean, she had to go to the hospital for a check-up, they gave her some meds which had to have some component she was allergic to and no one knew, she went into shock and died a day later. Cat went to the funeral and told him that if he needed someone to talk to she was there or something like that and - well, Dad is one of the few people who have two soulmates or so it looks like.”

“What?”

“He and my mom were,” Jon shrugs, “but he had the same reaction when he kissed Cat the first time, or so he said the only time we discussed it, and he remembered Old Westeros when they got married. He also said he’s glad she never did. But anyway - I barely even remember it, I was two when all of this went down. And - well, for the rest, everything went the way it was supposed to.”

“You mean -”

“Arya, Bran and Rickon are at home, yes.”

“Do they - well, no, that’s a stupid question, I was the freak who remembered everything when I was five.”

Sansa punches him in the shoulder. “There’s nothing freaky about that. Anyway, not yet. And to be honest I’m not sure that Arya and Bran wouldn’t be better off not remembering, but who knows. I did when I was thirteen, went to a museum with the school and saw this portrait of _Sansa Stark, Warden of the North_ , and everyone told me she looked like me. Well, guess what, of course she did.”

“I did before then,” Jon says. “It was when I met - some of the friends I had made at the Wall in elementary school. The ones I founded the non-profit with. We all remembered at the same time, but we kept it quiet. Actually it took me three months to realize Sansa did remember, too, and you don’t want to know how we went around to ask each other. It was just so bloody awkward.”

“Awkward?”

“Well, you don’t go up to someone and ask them if they remember being related to you in another life if you’re not sure, right?” Sansa asks. “Anyway, after that - well. We kind of wondered - if everyone was there, then you should have been.”

Robb isn’t sure he wants to hear it, but he nods and tells her to go on.

“We talked about it,” she keeps on. “And - we knew Mom didn’t remember, that was obvious. But we figured out Father did.”

“We kind of confronted him about it and he looked pained, and then said that it really wasn’t a topic we should bring up with Cat. Then he told the entire story. We asked if he ever tried to look you up -”

“And he said that he suggested it once but Mom just - started crying, said that you were probably better off with a nice family that could have been better to you than she’d have been as a single mother who wasn’t even out of high school and she’d rather keep it that way because she thought you’d have hated her if she somehow came into contact with you. So he never pressed it.”

Robb doesn’t know if he should just laugh or be angry about it, but what does he know.

“And - well, we couldn’t just go and ask her directly. So we tried to sneak around and see if we could track you down or something - we figured you’d be in Winterfell or nearby. The plan was - well, if we did find you and you didn’t remember us we’d have just left you alone, if you did - we were gonna cross that bridge when we got there. But we never got there anyway because your records aren’t anywhere to be found. So we never quite managed. And - that’s it, really.”

Robb snorts. “Don’t I know it. About my records, I mean. They’ve been lost for years.”

“Wait, you knew?”

“I’ve been trying to find a way to see them for ages. I mean, I figured - I remembered when I was five, Jon. I had figured that there had been some mistake and that you all had to be - out there. But every time I asked people just told me my paperwork from the first group home I was in couldn’t be found anywhere and - er, the guy in charge of the last. Janos Slynt.”

“What? That son of a bitch is in charge of _children_?” Jon sounds outraged.

“Wait, you know him?”

“I cut off his head,” Jon says, sheepishly. “Back then.”

“And I remember enough of him to ask myself who thought it was a good idea to put him anywhere near minors,” Sansa says, visibly disturbed.

“Yeah, don’t you ask me. Anyway, he hated me. And I broke his nose at one point. Anyway, point is, he ended up losing also the papers from the previous two homes and I had given up on finding them out. When I moved in with Theon my file was exactly ten pages long. After seventeen years in the system. Figures,” he sighs. “‘Course you wouldn’t find my files. And - right. Can I ask how - how my mom is doing, even if I’m not sure I want to know?”

Sansa and Jon look at each other, then shrug. “I can’t say,” he replies. “She came back home, said she needed some time on her own and no one’s seen her since, but she looked - like someone who feels hella guilty, I think.”

“That about covers it,” Sansa says. “Can I ask how did it go? Dad didn’t disclose any details.”

Robb snorts again, unable to keep it in. “Terribly. I mean, okay, I told you I was sure it was a mistake, right? Like, I had just assumed that something went wrong when I was born. Because - you know how we used to be back in - Old Westeros.”

Jon nods once, knowingly, and Sansa does as well - it’s no mystery, is it.

“So - so I figured that she’d be happy to see me, you know. I’m not going to say it was what kept me going because to be honest I had no hopes I’d end up finding any of you again, but I always thought that if it did ever happen - I don’t know what I thought. Maybe that she’d remember and we’d talk things out, because believe me but dying the way we did is something you want to talk out if you can, and I just - thought I could tell her a lot of things I hadn’t back in the day, and that then we’d just go back to that, you know. As much as we could.” He breathes in, trying to not give into the urge of checking if Theon’s still there and listening. “But then we sat down at that table and it just was so fucking awkward. I understood at once that she didn’t remember, but that’d have been fine anyway, if the rest had gone - better. But it just - we barely even shook hands, the more she looked at me the more she looked _guilty_ or something, it was obvious she wasn’t at ease. Then the whole adoption thing came out in the open and I had to break out to her that I never even got as far as a foster family never mind adoption. Then it just became - I think the both of us just wanted to be out of there. But shit, if she had just - told me, I really wouldn’t have cared. Like, I get it, and I wouldn’t have blamed her if she explained that, but she didn’t and - yeah. It was terrible.”

Jon squeezes his shoulder, sighing sympathetically, while Sansa gives him a knowing shrug. “How long are you staying?”

“Maybe another three or four days? I don’t know, but money’s tight as it is.”

“I’d have said give her one week and she’d have come around, probably,” Sansa sighs. “But - listen, just leave us your address and we’ll let you know, all right? She _will_ get it at some point, even if she doesn’t remember. She probably thinks that it’s her fault.”

“Yeah, I figured,” Robb sighs. “And - really. I don’t blame her, no one should want to raise a kid when they’re still in high school. It’s not her fault the system fucked it up for me, I just - I don’t care. But I guess - yesterday I probably didn’t look very happy about the situation.”

“Well, in your place I wouldn’t have either,” Jon says. “And listen, maybe it’s better that we keep things in between the three of us for now, but how about we all get coffee together tomorrow afternoon or whatever you’d like? Until you’re here - we should just take advantage of it, right?”

“Sure,” Robb says, feeling like at least some weight has left his shoulders. “Whatever you feel like.”

“Great,” Sansa says, squeezing his hand. “By the way, do you mind if I invite my best friend over? Considering that she’s been hearing about our failed attempts to track you down for ages, she’d probably want to meet you.”

“Well, okay,” Robb says, shrugging. “As long as she’s not, you know, expecting royalty…”

Jon lets out a strangled laugh. “Good thing you can joke about that,” he says.

“Hey, come on, Jeyne isn’t that kind of person,” Sansa says. “Fine, she doesn’t remember old Westeros and that’s probably better, but still -”

“Wait a moment,” Robb interrupts her. “ _Jeyne Poole_?”

“Well, it’s not her surname now, but yes. We met some eight years ago at school, she had just moved, and I don’t think she’ll remember anything at this point, but - Robb? What’s wrong?”

He’s plenty aware that he sounds hysterical as he erupts in chuckles he can’t keep in, but - this is too much. Of course it had to be Jeyne Poole.

“You can invite her,” he manages to say as he wipes tears from his eyes again. “Considering that we were roommates for a few months in the only decent foster home I was in, I think she remembers me.”

Sansa just stares at him. “What - _you_ were roommates?”

“Yes,” Robb manages to say, catching his breath. “And to be honest I missed her for a fucking long time. She was the only one I ever had who actually liked sharing with me, for some kind of reason I still haven’t fucking figured out.”

“Hey, stop getting yourself down.” Jon smacks him lightly on the back of his head and Robb doesn’t even try to tell him to fuck off - it’s so familiar he could weep all over again.

“Sansa, for the love of everything don’t tell her the details. We should probably film everything tomorrow.”

“Oh, _of course_ ,” Sansa replies, sounding smug now.

“You’re both evil,” Robb says without bite, “but okay, whatever. Should I tell Theon to come, too, by the way? I mean, if she doesn’t remember she wouldn’t mind, but - er. He does.”

Sansa nods somberly - Theon did say that one of the reasons she spared his life back in the day was that Jeyne asked. “If he wants to, then he should.”

“Good. They can bond over cheesy pop music.”

“What?” Jon asks.

“Never mind. You’ll find out tomorrow when they inevitably end up discussing how me and Theon met.”

“Why, how did that happen? Because you didn’t share _details_ ,” Sansa says, elbowing him slightly.

Robb figures there’s no sense in postponing it. “I was drunk. Like, _really_ fucking drunk. And I crashed under his window. And - like, Jeyne used to like fucking Backstreet Boys, and I ended up learning that shit by heart because I had to listen to it all the time for three months, and I started singing one when I was fucking wasted and that idiot started doing it along with me. If they don’t start arguing about who was their favorite out of those five idiots I’ll eat my hat.”

“We really have to film that,” Jon says, not even trying not to laugh, and Sansa follows him suit as she texts Jeyne.

Robb lets them - it is funny, looking back at it - and okay, fine, he didn’t need to actually see if Theon was listening to them outside the door -

_Told you it would go well, idiot. By the way, you can tell Snow I’m not going to feel ashamed for enjoying well-made pop music._

Robb laughs, too, figuring that Theon will sense how elated he feels right now, and decides that yeah, he really had been an idiot assuming the worst without even considering another outcome.

\--

“Told you that you were overreacting,” Theon tells him hours later, when Jon and Sansa have left after exchanging numbers and having agreed on a bar where they should meet tomorrow. They’re in bed, Robb is pretty much lying down with his back against Theon’s chest - even if now it’s more his side -, Theon has an arm around his waist and one hand tangled in his hair, they have a blanket thrown on top of the two of them and he feels a lot better than he had one day ago.

“Yeah, yeah, okay, you were right, I was an idiot, now can you go back to what you were doing before?”

Theon shakes his head and starts carding through Robb’s hair again, and - yeah, okay, it’s one of his weak spots, all right? But it’s just really nice, and intimate, and he had to admit to himself that he’s maybe starved for this kind of thing, but Theon doesn’t really seem to mind - all the contrary. Which - which is good, Robb figures, and he just breathes out before moving a bit so that he has his chest against Theon’s side and his head over Theon’s shoulder, snuggling in closer.

“As you wish, Your Grace,” Theon mutters, and Robb mock-punches him in the side.

“Your Grace my ass. Didn’t I tell you that I didn’t like it way back in the day or did you forget that?”

“I didn’t, but it’s adorable how it still riles you up.”

“Yeah, well, I fucking hated it. And I should have never done it.”

“Maybe, but believe me, you weren’t half as bad at it as you think now.”

“You say that. Can we just pretend I never was in any position of responsibility in my entire life?”

“As you wish,” Theon says, still sounding way too smug.

Robb sighs fondly - obviously this century Theon isn’t above admitting to a few limited people that The Princess Bride is actually one of his favorite movies, and Robb knows that, and he knows he’s quoting the damned thing, and he knows where he’s aiming at.

“Me too, even if you really need to stop calling me like that.”

Theon just laughs and hooks his ankles around Robb’s and Robb just leans up without disentangling himself, his mouth finding Theon’s a moment later. A couple years ago he used to stop dead in his tracks whenever they were doing something like this and he’d find himself thinking, _so this is what being happy feels like_ , because every time it was the kind of thought that he never dared entertain for most of his life, but as it happens now, he just throws an arm behind Theon’s back and kisses him a bit more forcefully.

Maybe he really can get the hang of this, soon, he thinks, and the idea almost makes his head spin in the best sense of the word.

“Hey,” Theon asks when they’re taking a moment to catch their breath a while later, “everything all right?”

“Hell, yes,” Robb blurts, leaning back down, his hands grabbing the sides of Theon’s face, and he entirely means it.

 

End.


End file.
